New Horizons flies by Uranus

March 21, 2011
By Nancy Atkinson, Universe Today

An 'overhead' view of New Horizons' location. Credit: NASA

The Pluto-bound New Horizons spacecraft will fly by another planet today (March 18, 2011). However, the robotic craft wont be taking any images as it zooms past Uranus orbit at about 6 p.m. EDT, 3.8 billion kilometers (2.4 billion miles) away from the gas giant (and 2.0 billion km (1.8 billion miles) from Earth). New Horizons is currently in hibernation mode, and the great distance from Uranus means any observations wouldnt provide much as far as data and images. But, even so, this event is a landmark so to speak in New Horizons gauntlet across the solar system.

New Horizons is all about delayed gratification, and our 9 1/2-year cruise to the Pluto system illustrates that, said Principal Investigator Alan Stern, of the Southwest Research Institute. Crossing the orbit of Uranus is another milepost along our long journey to the very frontier of exploration.

New Horizons is now well over halfway through its journey to Pluto. Motoring along at 57,9000 km/hr (36,000 mph), it will travel more than 4.8 billion km (3 billion miles) to fly past Pluto and its moons Nix, Hydra and Charon in July 2015.

This video is not supported by your browser at this time.

But the journey doesnt end there. After that, New Horizons will head off to a post-Pluto encounter with other objects within the Kuiper Belt, some event(s) which might take place even into the 2020′s. The planetary science community is working on the selection of potential targets.

The mission still has more than 4 years to go to get to Pluto; it will take 9 nine months to send all the data back to Earth.

The next planetary milestone for New Horizons will be the orbit of Neptune, which it crosses on Aug. 25, 2014, exactly 25 years after Voyager 2 made its historic exploration of that giant planet.

This mission is a marathon, says Project Manager Glen Fountain, of the Johns Hopkins University Applied Physics Laboratory. The New Horizons team has been focused on keeping the spacecraft on course and preparing for Pluto. So far, so good, and we are working to keep it that way.

The University of Colorado at Boulder student-built science instrument on NASA's New Horizons mission to Pluto has been renamed to honor another famous student -- the 11-year-old girl who named the ninth planet more than ...

NASA's New Horizons spacecraft is on the doorstep of the solar system's largest planet. The spacecraft will study and swing past Jupiter, increasing speed on its voyage toward Pluto, the Kuiper Belt and beyond.

NASA's New Horizons spacecraft successfully completed a flyby of Jupiter early this morning, using the massive planet's gravity to pick up speed for its 3-billion mile voyage to Pluto and the unexplored Kuiper Belt region ...

Recommended for you

What if I told you that recent experiments have revealed a revolutionary new method of propulsion that threatens to overthrow the laws of physics as we know them? That its inventor claims it could allow us to travel to the ...

The coalescence of two black holes—a very violent and exotic event—is one of the most sought-after observations of modern astronomy. But, as these mergers emit no light of any kind, finding such elusive events has been ...

The recent discovery of an Earth twin has boosted chances there is intelligent life on other planets. But while Pope Francis's telescope scans the starlit skies, the Vatican is sceptical of ever meeting Mr. Spock.

A dying star's final moments are captured in this image from the NASA/ESA Hubble Space Telescope. The death throes of this star may only last mere moments on a cosmological timescale, but this star's demise is still quite ...

2 comments

Well, New Horizons is NOT flying by Uranus, it is merely crossing the orbit of Uranus. Which they do specify later on in the article... but still, are accurate headlines too much to ask for? If that overhead chart is to scale, Uranus will be much farther from New Horizons than New Horizons is to Pluto.